Against War, Against Peace

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The small number of people today who appear
to oppose America's present bloody military interventions must be aplodded
for their courage and persistance.

They stand against the masses' constant,
unthinking aproval of military force. And they are faced with situation
where they have no ideas to give them any expectations that they could
effectively oppose these interventions.

The ideas put at the recent anti-war demos
seem approximately divided between pacifism and reformulations of the classical
Trotskist or Maoist left. Each of these approaches have some insights into
the conditions of the current slaughter (we are writing at the point of
simultaneous bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq). Passifists
realize that the actions of each side serves mainly to polarize the entire
situation. Leninist leftists realize that each side is motivated by market
forces and the need to preserve capitalism. Each position has totally ridiculous
qualities as well. Pacificist ideology implies that the government, the
powerful or "we," may somehow just wake-up to the "mistake" that were made
and change the course of the war. Each Leninists group looks for a particular
nation to push as "oppressed" and naturally ignores the obvious common
interest each national gangster has with the other. The different flavors
"socialist" absurdly talk about "imperialism" when capitalism conquered
the entire world and NATO's intervention surely serves to strength the
bloody nationalism of Yugoslavia/Serbia.

What each side misses is that this war is
an inherent result of normal daily life. What is naively called peace -
work, shopping and television - is the health of the state and the war
machine. The housing development, the industrial park and the shopping
mall create and are created by the military industrial complex. Not only
does military production sustain the economy, but every dictatorial institution,
from McDonalds to Microsoft to the Department of Defense, reinforces every
other. The wars of today are quite correctly called "police actions." America's
army intervenes on world scale to keep the same bloody order that cops
protect on a local level. The goal of NATO is not to simply to dominate
Kosova but to control the direction of it's development - to assure that
exploitation and peace prevail.

Just as in Somalia, the war in Kosova began
to impose a "humanitarian solution" to the problem of a dispossessed that
would not behave. And this humanitarian solution is the order of capitalism
itself. "Humanitarian" organizations around the world have shown themselve
to be in many ways as much pawns of world capitalist as NATO. While some
NGOs are simply fronts for west intelligence agencies, their fundamental
problem comes as they operate with the paradigm of putting the dispossessed
in a positon of dependence and training the dispossessed for order of development.
In this way, the "NGOs" serve as social workers ("soft cops") to NATOs
hard cops. The humanitarian peace that NATO, NGOs and the United Nations
seeks impose is specifically to keep proletarians in a position of dependence.
If the various nations or organizations disagree about methods, it merely
a question of fighting about who gets to carve up the pie. A full picture
of this process can be seen in UN "humanitarian" refugee camps set-up after
the uprising against Saddam Husain in Northern Iraq ("Kurdistan"). These
camps demanded proletarian surrender their weapons in exchange for food
- food which the UN had itself embargo against Iraq. The camps were served
to defeat the rebellious proletarians who were fighting America's supposed
enemy, Saddam Hussein. Indeed, US forces in the Gulf War had already killed
50,000 Iraqi deserters while working hard to keep Saddam Huesain in power.
(It is quite possible that once the dust settles in Kosova we will find
that similar rebellions happened and were suppressed by both sides. But
naturally, the actual situation is difficult to determine). In any case,
the present order of war and peace is directly against the proletariat,
and our rebellions, our refusal to accept the dictatorship of money, of
work and bureaucracy.